Got an urgent notice from the hosting provider that WordPress 2.9 has a security issue and we need to upgrade the blog to version 2.9.2. So. Doing the upgrade this evening. If you don’t hear from us for awhile, the upgrade will have failed. It’s happened before.

“Just like old times” Rob Sawyer had suggested to us, and by “us” I mean the SFContario concom. Rob has been a big supporter of SFContario since we first started talking about a new fall con in Toronto and the conversation at First Thursday, a monthly gathering of the fen in Toronto, invariably turns to it. When he found out that Michael Swanwick had accepted our invitation to be Author Guest of Honour, he came up with the idea. After all, Rob, our Toastmaster, has written books about dinosaurs: the Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy; Michael Swanwick wrote a book about dinosaurs: Bones of the Earth, and our goal was to create a fannish con just like downtown Toronto used to have. So a theme of “Just like old times” built around dinosaurs was a good fit.

Of course, it evolved (some might argue devolved), from there. You see, since our editor Guests of Honour are Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, proprietors of the excellent blog, Making Light, and it turns out that if you google the phrase “dinosaur sodomy” the first hit leads to a story, involving Michael Swanwick, first related on Making Light. Well, bring in a connection to two more guests of honour, stir in a slightly irreverent concom, and the next thing you know, dinosaur sodomy became the unofficial theme for SFContario.

The story goes something like this: Michael Swanwick was teaching a week at Clarion and a student came to him with a story, full of angst and sodomy. He read the story and told the student “What this story needs is more dinosaurs.” A day or two later the student brings him a story about dinosaurs. “What this story needs,” he says, “is more sodomy.”  He then explained to the perplexed class that “all writing is about finding the correct balance between dinosaurs and sodomy.” (The story goes on from there, and is very funny. You should read it all, including the comments. See here.)

So, where to go from there?  You can doubtless take dinosaur sodomy to a lot of places, some of them frightening. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” we mused, “if we had a dinosaur t-shirt.  Something very subtle, perhaps one dinosaur standing behind another.” The intention was that somebody would only be likely to see it if they were already in on the joke; we figured we could probably sell a hundred or so to the denizens of Making Light alone. So we turned to local fan artist and Hugo nominee Taral Wayne. We told him what we were looking for. “It has to be subtle, okay, nothing too obvious, and also subtle…oh and did we mention that we were looking for something subtle?” 

Taral Wayne being subtle

Apparently no, we didn’t, not strongly enough. Below is the drawing Taral did for us. We love it. It’s probably not going to be on a t-shirt anytime soon, but we’ll find a way to use it. Maybe for a progress report, a suitable follow up to the Sue Mason illo that appears in progress report 1, and it’s a great conversation starter at parties. In the meantime I, for one, look forward to Taral’s further attempts at subtlety.

Still not sure how we’re going to explain the dinosaur sodomy to Rob Sawyer, though.

Enjoy! Comments welcome.

First post for the news blog for SFContario! In fact this is posted well before the blog actually goes public. Part of the reason for this post is just to have some content for other test users to look at before we go live with this.

But since I’m here, I might as well say something. I’ll answer three questions:

Q. Why start a new convention?

A. The truth is that each person is going to have their own answer to that question. As I write this, fifty weeks until our convention with 49 paid members, it seems clear that some people want us to do this. I am reminded of Henry Ford’s answer to the question of whether buyers could get the Model T Ford in different colors. His answer was, “Any color that they want, as long as it’s black.”

Ford’s point was that building a new thing is expensive and that one’s choices are limited by the resources, people, and technology available. In his day, it was a miracle to have these machines produced at a cost people could afford. (My father’s first car was a 1930 Model A Ford, and today my brother works for Ford in Detroit, so I can use these examples.) However, one of the things I was taught in business school was that the key to success was to give people what they want, especially if it was something they couldn’t get other ways.

So having considered a lot of variables, costs, obstacles, and options, I found a couple of simple things. A lot of people wanted more fandom. Toronto’s convention calendar has gone from March to July. There have been conventions in the fall in the past, but nothing current. Many people also wanted a convention easy to get to, or in a location that was convenient to the amenities of our amazing city. Evaluating on just these two factors, it seemed clear that there was a demand in our community waiting to be filled. All I then needed was a group of people willing to help. Fortunately I found some people who had a fair bit of convention experience outside Toronto, some who were working on other conventions in Toronto who wanted to do something different, some who had worked on local conventions in the past and wanted to get involved again. And that was enough to get started.

These aren’t the only factors, but they are the main ones. Certainly there are people, including me, who want to do a few things differently. There are a few best practices widely used outside Toronto that don’t happen in some local conventions. A few self-styled “Canadian Conrunners” are Canadians first and conrunners second, and don’t seem interested in what works at US conventions. But this isn’t important, not enough reason to go to the effort of starting a new convention. Really the important points that we all agree on is just having a convention in the fall and having a convention downtown. The rest is trivia.

In particular, we don’t see what we are doing as being in competition with other local conventions. We may not do everything exactly the same, and a bit of friendly rivalry can help us learn what approaches works better. But our goal is to expand and deepen the community of fandom, by bringing in new people and by giving fans currently active more to do. We  think a rising tide will float all the boats, that bringing new activity to the Toronto community of fandom will be good for everyone in the long run. I’m personally active in Chicago fandom, where they have three general-interest science fiction conventions as well as several more special interest conventions, and what I have observed is that there are people who will support all the conventions as long as they are at least a couple months apart, so ultimately the success of each convention is the result of its own plans and practices, not because of what any other concom might be doing in the same area.

Q. Why have a blog?

The suggestion came from Murray Moore. I had to figure out what we might do with a blog that we can’t do with LiveJournal, Facebook, Google Groups, our internal committee intranet, our main web site, or other channels (I’m playing with Twitter this week). Based on a good panel at Smofcon this past weekend (Diane was a panelist), I came to the conclusion that each channel reached a different audience. The idea of hammering out exactly the same message through every communications channel is a 20th-century paradigm; in the new age, the idea is that different voices and techniques will appeal to different groups of listeners.

This blog will be our most “official” voice, used for announcements that will be pushed out via RSS to anyone who wants to listen. Our LiveJournal community will be a more lateral channel used for people to talk to us and to each other. This is important, so we will integrate it as a widget into this blog. Facebook will be a secondary channel that will help us update the massive community of Facebook users. Twitter will have two purposes; before the convention just to remind people we exist by bringing little announcements or just “re-tweets” of items we think people might be interested, and during the con just to let people know how things are going. Facebook and Twitter will also be used to link to our blog posts and any interesting discussions that arise on our LiveJournal community. Our Google Groups list will be used for our committee (and anyone really interested) in what we plan to do for the convention, and our intranet forum will mainly be used for storing documents, or occasionally for issues not ready for public discussion.

Q. Why not make the blog public now?

It’s not ready yet. Well, I installed a theme that almost does what we want, but by default it’s set up with a lot of red colors that are the exact opposite of our usual green. There are places we can put proper graphics, but it will involve finding theme directories and manually editing various CSS and PHP files. It should all get done by early in the new year, though we may roll this out kind of slowly and incrementally between now and then.